In those earlier days when the family was fresh from the frugality of the hills, its elder members had constantly been appalled by the youth’s extravagance.  Yet, even then, he had overruled them with an autocratic assurance, which knew no doubt.  It had not at first been easy for the gentle mother, whose hands were red from decades of tub and dishpan, and the father whose fingers had gripped the plow, to adapt themselves to the idle and effortless regime of this new order.

It had for a long while been impossible for them to escape the fear of a crash in which all this iridescent and artificial seeming must collapse.  But his attitude remained unaltered.  “I do not mean to let money be my master,” he had obstinately reiterated.  “To me it shall be a slave.  Money conquers the man who fears it.  It is an insolent, inanimate underling, which, if not treated with contempt, becomes a tyrant.  Scorn it and it serves you blindly.  I must seem a rich man before I can become one.  It is my wish that my family appear the family of a rich man.  Economies that are apparent are confessions of failure.”

In the first chapters they protested, but Ham swept their protests intolerantly aside, and as the years went on he piled miracle upon miracle until every promise of his unsupported egotism had become an accomplished and undeniable reality.  Then they ceased to fear and trusted implicitly in the star that led him.  Gradually they yielded to the blandishments of the new life and drifted pleasantly before the breezes of luxury.  The man who had been a bearded and Calvinistic countryman for almost a half-century became in less than a decade an ease-loving and slothful old gentleman, dapper of appearance, rosy of face and inclining toward embonpoint.

Now it is fundamentally written in the edicts of Truth that a man must go forward or back, and if his hands hang idle at his sides, he will not advance.  Thomas Standish Burton was born to buffet the storms of his mountains, and as long as he followed his destiny he could look his fellow-man in the face with the level eyes of independence.  Within his limitations, he could think wholesomely and soundly.  But here he was a different man, a Samson shorn, and the things which he had first contemptuously waved aside or accepted with a growl in his throat, he now welcomed.  The hard brown face was rounded and pink and where there had been rawhide muscles on his torso there was now soft and fatty flesh; for Tom Burton whom men had accounted a giant of immovable resolution back there among the forests was, in these days, a gentleman and wore a gardenia or a carnation in his lapel.  It was not originally his fault.  The process of becoming a gentleman had pained and irked him, but he had a masterful son who could not afford that his father should wear a shaggy bark, and that masterful son had been suffocating him with opulence until his powers of resistance had become atrophied.